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Popular Culture Review
science fiction novel usually depicts a god-like entity that the main character
must fight and defeat in order to conquer his freedom. The treatment of this
particular narrative paradigm in Spanish science fiction echoes the quasi-perfect
structural equivalence between Franco’s totalitarian regime and the Catholic
concept of pyramidal hierarchy, fused within the national-catholic ideology.
Although the presence of a more or less divine entity is hardly a novel idea in
science fiction,9 here again, the proportions differ: Spanish science fiction
appears much more concerned than its US counterpart with the relationship
between the Human and a concrete manifestation of an openly religious
Absolute, which is expressed through unlimited power and/or total control, and
merges totalitarianism and religion. Unlike canonical science fiction Anglo
Saxon novels, such as Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World,10 which
describe an essentially physical type of totalitarianism,11 Spanish science fiction
authors conceive repression as both physical and metaphysical, and the divine
entity that must be defeated is a god as well as a dictator.
The state of contemporary Spanish science fiction is particularly
representative of the on-going struggle of Spanish consciousness with the
shadows of its past, however anachronistic it may seem in today’s globalized
landscape. Because of its great narrative flexibility, which allows it to generate
new and unexpected yet coherent universes, the genre of science fiction has
become privileged ground to explore as well as to denounce the weight of the
ideological make-up that has determined the country’s cultural output